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i felt the need to make comment, but, the reply button would not work on either, so I guess they've been locked?

From the perspective of a (long-standing) member of the HOP community, i felt it was important to put forward two points-

1. why some may feel the need to talk about the banning of another long-standing member of the community, not necessarily to criticise those who made that decision, but, simply because that is what community members do when someone is exiled- they feel the need to talk about it

2. address the posted comment by a mod that, from the perspectice of a mod, any discussion of said members banning, is necessarily disrespectful to the mods

To elaborate on point 2, IMO, the discussion on the threads that have been removed or locked, did not come across as disrespectful to the mods.

To question a decision is not necessarily disrespectful.

It's true that the banning of NYC has gone largely unnoticed, till now. But, now, it has very much been noticed and, to expect this community to not talk about it, is, IMO, unrealistic.

There may be very good background reasons why it's seen as best for no discussion to take place, but, obviously, from the perspective of the community, those reasons are not known.

I know it's a difficult thing to make judgements on.

The main thing I want to say is that I find it very unpleasent when multiple threads are locked or removed, when, in my eyes, they contained nothing offensive.

I would also like the mods to examine the possibility that the pulled/stoped discussions are actually not disrespectful to HOP or the mods, but are simply members of the community discussing something which is important to them.

I'm assuming that this thread is not also going to be seen as disrespectful- it's certainly not intended as such.

If threads discussing this chain of events are going to be systematically pulled or locked, then, like many here, I'm going to be wondering whether I'm part of this community any more.

A community talks- that's the point of it.

If that talk is abusive, damaging, hurtful, then it has to be pulled- no questions about it.

But I'm concerned that what is developing here is the pulling of stuff that is not at all abusive, damaging or hurtful.

Banning someone for good reasons is one thing, but expecting the community to 'never again utter their name' is dodgy as hell

"You can't outrun Death forever.But you can make the Bastard work for it."

Returning to a unique state of EquilibriumLocation: Adelaide, South Australia

Total posts: 3289

Posted:13th May 2008 Written by :onewheeldave

If people witnessed the alleged abuses, then there would be no doubt in anyones mind- if they don't witness any of it, then there will be doubt.

which makes me wonder why some people attack HOP administration so harshly (eg cant trust any current mod or admin to tell the truth-harsh), when they obviously weren't 'involved' enough with the goings on on the board to even be aware of the flames and counter flames going on over long periods of time. Now, if they were aware of them at the time, they would, *at the very least* realise that the NYC thing certainly wasn't the 'cut n dried' example of abuse of power that it's certainly being made out to be.

Sure, if the posts were frozen and were on view, even the most untrusting person would have to admit that there was a tough call to make, and I'm fairly sure they would be able to see who was the more aggressive - especially at the end when the final decision (after many warnings) was made. I'm just amazed that people are using this as an example...with so little evidence to back their arguments.

So - to summarise,

things we can do better in the future (without potentially extensive modifications of code)

- more use of pointers when threads are moved (and potentially removing the option for users to move threads, due to no public accountability)- change the tag line of banned users to banned- freeze all that users posts so that all can see (of course if involved in a conversation, there is nothing to stop the other user modifying their posts afterwards to twist the knife of blame further into the banned and defenseless user)

thats it?

Yakumo - As much as I think many of your suggestions sound great, I think you need to make suggestions that can be carried out with our system in our context. If you can find modules that can be added to help, or *easy* hacks that are unlikely to break any of the other functionality, then such suggestions would be most gratefully received.

--Help! My personality got stuck in this signature machine and I cant get it out!

If people witnessed the alleged abuses, then there would be no doubt in anyones mind- if they don't witness any of it, then there will be doubt.

which makes me wonder why some people attack HOP administration so harshly (eg cant trust any current mod or admin to tell the truth-harsh), when they obviously weren't 'involved' enough with the goings on on the board to even be aware of the flames and counter flames going on over long periods of time. Now, if they were aware of them at the time, they would, *at the very least* realise that the NYC thing certainly wasn't the 'cut n dried' example of abuse of power that it's certainly being made out to be.

Sure, if the posts were frozen and were on view, even the most untrusting person would have to admit that there was a tough call to make, and I'm fairly sure they would be able to see who was the more aggressive - especially at the end when the final decision (after many warnings) was made. I'm just amazed that people are using this as an example...with so little evidence to back their arguments.

Let's be clear on the fact that those who could be said to be 'attacking HOP admin' are very much in the minority- most involved in the various issues (around NYCs banning and the (related but seperate) ones to do with thread lockings/deletions) are not attacking HOP admin.

I'm certainly under the impression that, despite starting this thread and having expressed dissatisfaction with some of the thread lockings/deletions, i'm in no way 'attacking' HOP admin (correct me if I'm under the wrong impression on that).

I really do think that there is evidence of a general 'over-sensitivity' on the part of some mods/admins- that they are seeing far more 'attacking' than is actually the case.

As for why some may not have been 'involved enough' with the flames and counter-flames- maybe they weren't actually reading the threads in question cos they were on subjects they weren't interested in- maybe it took place during a time when they weren't particularly active.

That doesn't mean they weren't reading them cos they weren't interested in NYC, or the issues occuring.

I'm not really sure what point you're actually making there.

Written by : Pyrolific

Written by : onewheeldave

If people witnessed the alleged abuses, then there would be no doubt in anyones mind- if they don't witness any of it, then there will be doubt.

Sure, if the posts were frozen and were on view, even the most untrusting person would have to admit that there was a tough call to make, and I'm fairly sure they would be able to see who was the more aggressive - especially at the end when the final decision (after many warnings) was made. I'm just amazed that people are using this as an example...with so little evidence to back their arguments.

that's just the thing that some are finding a little presumptious- you're fairly sure that we would see who was the more aggressive.

Fact is, I (or others), may read the exact same posts and have a different view on who was the more aggressive.

Then again, I might not, i might be in complete aggreement with your assessment, but, in the absence of those posts, we'll never know.

What I do know though, is that I've witnessed past bannings of members where, it was clear to me, that the behaviour was not purely down to the individual who ultimately was banned- I've seen clear cases where that individual was goaded and provoked by several others and, that that seemed to be missed entirely by mods.

So, because of that, I'm in favour of evidence being left, so everyone can see it- that eliminates the need for 'trust'.

Written by :

So - to summarise,

things we can do better in the future (without potentially extensive modifications of code)

- more use of pointers when threads are moved (and potentially removing the option for users to move threads, due to no public accountability)- change the tag line of banned users to banned- freeze all that users posts so that all can see (of course if involved in a conversation, there is nothing to stop the other user modifying their posts afterwards to twist the knife of blame further into the banned and defenseless user)

thats it?

And, I would add, as my opinion on this-

*a commitment to not moving, locking or deleting threads, except as the very last resort

if, in a thread, an individual is offensive or flaming, IMO, it is that individual who should be dealt with, the practice of 'locking' threads which seems very common on other boards, has always struck me as bad.

"You can't outrun Death forever.But you can make the Bastard work for it."

Now, if they were aware of them at the time, they would, *at the very least* realise that the NYC thing certainly wasn't the 'cut n dried' example of abuse of power that it's certainly being made out to be.

I don't think that it's being made out to be a 'cut'n'dried abuse of power'.

The main point being made is that most of us have no idea of whether it was a good call, or a bad call, cos virtually all evidence was, for some reason, removed.

It could well be, if most of the relevant posts had not been removed, that most of us would read them and agree that NYC was indeed out-of-order and that he should have been banned.

But, the posts have been deleted.

And then, of course, a succession of other threads asking questions were also moved/deleted, which onlt served to increase curiousity and, in some, give rise to 'conspiracy' concerns.

"You can't outrun Death forever.But you can make the Bastard work for it."

Returning to a unique state of EquilibriumLocation: Adelaide, South Australia

Total posts: 3289

Posted:13th May 2008OWD - I think we agree on the posts being deleted thing. I'm not sure who did that, whether it was done at the request of NYC or as a admin 'cleanup' function, but I think you can see, that we are both agreeing that that is a valid point.

Theres no conspiracy, just a bunch of people trying to do their best in an unpleasant situation to look after the dignity and privacy of those involved. Theres always going to be a clash between freedom of information and right to privacy - and its a pretty tough line to draw, especially as we hardly ever have to do it.

Again, I'd like to reaffirm my commitment to being a good mod, and call for suggestions from the user group of policies and guidelines for making these decisions. Thankyou OWD, for setting out yours so clearly, your points are logical. I've acknowledged other peoples contributions already - and I was wondering if anyone else would like to comment at this point?

--Help! My personality got stuck in this signature machine and I cant get it out!

Yakumo - As much as I think many of your suggestions sound great, I think you need to make suggestions that can be carried out with our system in our context. If you can find

modules that can be added to help, or *easy* hacks that are unlikely to break any of the other functionality, then such suggestions would be most gratefully received.

As I much as I would dearly love to give advice fully in context, that is riddled with obstacles, I had said -

Written by :Yakumo

I was going to install ubb.threads on my apache dev box to see what it can do, and what plugins would be worth suggesting, but I don't know what version hop runs,

and it's a commercial only product

But I have spent a good 4 or 5 hours now looking into it as far as I can :

tbh it's not a nice system to manage imo, but it is lightweight, it could be considerably more functional without jeopardizing that at all though.

I absolutely would not consider it for managing any community with more than a (low) few hundred members myself, I think it's entire management system is inadequate, it's user support/3rd party mod scene is in direct relation to this, very small. Rather than modifying it to be better suited, people are just using better systems. Both free (SMF, phpBB) and commercial systems (vbulletin) from the last 3 or 4 years outclass it.

I actually spent a couple of hours doing a comparison with SMF, vbulletin (my favourite free and commercial forum systems) but have removed that write up from here to keep the post size down from astronomical (HoP may have no interest in converting, but it's wise to know what is out there)

UBB has strictly 2 levels of elevated users (mod or admin), with no room for customization on that.

Mods have no control over any other function on the board available to admins (display options, forum creation, portal options, automated task settings) Even with Edit Users permission they cannot change a users level, only groups.

The ONLY thing that happens when you report a post is it emails the mods (and the administrators if they have specifically opted IN to moderator events). This makes moderator collaboration harder, and wastes time looking into issues that may have already been resolved (suggested plugin available for v7 bellow)

UBB Threads has no moderator logs, only admin actions are logged. I found this very surprising, this single fact alone makes me consider this system unusable for sites with >500 users as you need a collection of mods at that point. Personally I wouldn't hire someone to mod a site for my business without accountability, let alone raise a user to do it for free. Seperate Mod logs aren't entirely necessary if there is a report are logged/closed off (see 7.2 Custom moderator-notify handler), and stealth edits are disabled.

There are no plugins to add mod action logging that I can find, which is not surprising as it would require editing the code for every mod action.

As I do not know what version of UBB Threads hop is running on (though versions prior to 6 were not called 'ubb threads') I've gone through plugins for the latest version, and hope either HoP can be upgraded, or the plugin fairly easily backported. These are, in no particular order, a bunch of plugins that would improve moderation, or seem otherwise useful.

This is the absolute limit of what I can do without buying UBB Threads, or elevated HoP access, there isn't any downloadable version I could test the plugin/mod compatibility or functionality with.

The only user reduction that can be done out of the box, short of temp or perm banning, is it is possible to remove a users ability to send or receive PM's.

Auto ban labels:

There are no mods I've found to do this for UBB, but I've been able to look at the database of the hosted demo from the forums 'database tools'

Wherever the forum pulls out userdata from the database it will be including the USER_IS_BANNED flag, from the USERS table, it is also pulling USER_CUSTOM_TITLE from the USER_PROFILE table. it would be trivial to find where it is doing something akin to '$DisplayUserTitle=USER_CUSTOM_TITLE'

Getting it to have a seperate one for temp bans is slightly less trivial as you then would also have to open up the BANNED_USERS table, if BAN_EXPIRATION != 0 then it's a temp ban. it's potentially not worth the extra DB hit for semantics.

Offtopic: Other optimization Depending on what HoP's server, there are various cache options that could help reduce server load if not implemented already, xcache, APC, eAccelerator, Turck MMCache, Memcached (not all together ) also apache and mysql cache options.

I can't support this (even though I cheekily suggested it in my 'sarcastic' post).

I'd rather see the tag line changed to 'account inactive'. THe 'banned' tag doesn't seem entirely fair to people, and I really think would get more people talking about the banning rather than getting on with talking about fun fire things...

'account inactive' is a friendlier way to alert people to the fact htat poster isn't here any more.

Posted:14th May 2008What Ade says. I've suggested that before somewhere a few pages back. Of course it won't work if people who have willingly left aren't on the same "account inactive" status. "Banned", especially if it's temporary, will not do the banned user any favours.

"vices are like genitals - most are ugly to behold, and yet we find that our own are dear to us."(G.W. Dahlquist)

Posted:14th May 2008As has been said earlier, if a user is banned, they are banned, it is an intentional action that requires mod/admin action, be it a temporary or permanent ban. If a mod is concerned about appearances that much, they have to consider not banning them in the first place.

Putting 'account inactive' for a banned user is semantics to the point of dishonesty frankly.

Posted:14th May 2008Sorry to argue semantics, but I just want to put a vote in for 'account inactive' because that could equally mean that the person has left on their own accord. Account suspended still has the stigma of public humiliation that the person has been reprimanded by the mods.

I suppose the question is what actually *is* the punishment of banning?

If it's being removed from the community (which is what I see it as) then the removal on it's own should be the punishment and there shouldn't be public ridicule by having a status announcing it.

i would have changed ***** to phallus, and claire to petey Petey

Rougie: but that's what I'm doing hereArnwyn: what letting me adjust myself in your room?..don't you dare quote that on HoP...

Returning to a unique state of EquilibriumLocation: Adelaide, South Australia

Total posts: 3289

Posted:14th May 2008but its also confusing to give the same tag for people who have voluntarily left of their own accord and asked to be removed from our DB, and people who have literally been banned? after all, this has all started because people claim that we tried to hide the fact that NYC had been banned? Its not a punishment in terms of ridicule, its to ensure theres open-ness about whats going on.

talk about mixed messages!!! this is exactly why we've got into this mess, by trying to preserve dignity and privacy *sighs*.

--Help! My personality got stuck in this signature machine and I cant get it out!

Posted:14th May 2008If a user leaves of their own accord they don't ask to be banned, neither does anything automatically ban you if you don't log in for literally years. A ban is specifically a barring, a banishment, a punishment.

'Account suspended' is back to heavily implying it's temporary when it might not be.

I guess a lot of this comes down to myself not seeing "banned" as meaning permanent by default, just as a statement of the users status, same as banning someone from driving.

My view perhaps is tainted by the fact all forums I've ever worked with call the act of barring a user access a "ban" both internally in mod/admin panels and externally to users, I've banned a lot of people, and a lot of sites already do all this automatically so it's a non issue there, but I think you're trying to be overly fluffy over something that is inherently not.

I think you trying to make it 'nicer' is actually not doing the banned user justice either. If banned unfairly, which seems to be your worry, it is even more important that other users (even mods) know the state of affairs truthfully.

NB. HTML/colours would be a good idea, and/or block the selected choice of words from user selectable titles, so users can't add that themselves to fake a self ban.

Posted:14th May 2008I had the impression from this discussion that permanent ban for people who actually were members of the community once, and not just spambots, are the very rare exception, so if there was a vote I'd support the "suspended". But as long as some tag is agreed on I'm not really that fussed, it's more important that one is introduced than exactly what it says.

"vices are like genitals - most are ugly to behold, and yet we find that our own are dear to us."(G.W. Dahlquist)

'Account suspended' is back to heavily implying it's temporary when it might not be.

But it might only be temporary - as far as I understood it, bans can and have been overturned.

Written by

I think you're trying to be overly fluffy over something that is inherently not.

BWHAHAAAHAHAHAHA

me fluffy?

Written by

I think you trying to make it 'nicer' is actually not doing the banned user justice either. If banned unfairly, which seems to be your worry, it is even more important that other users (even mods) know the state of affairs truthfully.

True - I am trying to make it nicer - because HoP IS a nice place to be, it's not like other forums as has been acknowledged. Why hit people over the head with a brickbat, when there may be a nicer way to deal with it.

And my worry is not people being banned unfairly (that's not my call to make, I trust the mods to do thier job), it's how we then treat people afterwards. Do we write them off? or do we work with people and welcome them back to our community when they are ready to engage in the forum the way most of our memebers do?

Sorry to argue semantics, but I just want to put a vote in for 'account inactive' because that could equally mean that the person has left on their own accord. Account suspended still has the stigma of public humiliation that the person has been reprimanded by the mods.

I suppose the question is what actually *is* the punishment of banning?

If it's being removed from the community (which is what I see it as) then the removal on it's own should be the punishment and there shouldn't be public ridicule by having a status announcing it.

On every other forum on the whole internet (that's probably an exaggeration, but certainly a large proportion of forums) changes a member status to "Banned", "Banished" or whatever once a member has been banned. For one reason, it lets members know who's around and who isn't, as well as properly enforcing the rules. If you know someone's been banned for whatever reason, you're not going to do the same thing if you want to stick around.

As for public humiliation?

Its the internet. Anyone humiliated by a ban from any forum, let alone this one, needs to go outside and get some fresh air.

Besides, I'd be slapping out high fives to anyone that managed to get banned from HoP

The existance of flamethrowers says that someone, somewhere, at sometime said "I need to set that thing on fire, but it's too far away."

FRD, it has been established many times that HoP is a very different piece of splendor on the net. On most other boards you either see tonnes of flaming or tyranical styles of moderation.Just because all the other kids are setting each other on fire doesn't mean we...oh wait..;)

Oh don't get me wrong. I know this place is waaaaaaaaay different/better than every other forum on the net. That being said, it doesn't necessarily mean that all of "their" systems aren't good ideas.

The existance of flamethrowers says that someone, somewhere, at sometime said "I need to set that thing on fire, but it's too far away."